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This is the last of a six-part series on how your business
can get started on YouTube. In this installment, we examine how
to track the performance of your YouTube videos.

Uploading a video to YouTube is just
the start of a continuing process. You need to measure the
effectiveness of each of your videos to
learn how you can improve the next one.

YouTube provides its own performance-tracking tool that examines
the key metrics for all videos on its site. YouTube Analytics puts some of the most
important metrics right on the video viewing page. More
detailed metrics are presented when you click the Analytics
button beneath each video.

Here are five things you'll want to do when tracking the
performance of the videos you post to your company's YouTube
page:

1. Track views.
The first metric marketers look at is also the most basic: how
many people have viewed your video in a given period of time.
YouTube also lets you analyze the demographic composition of
those views, by gender, age and location.

How many views is a good number? It depends on your goals. If
your video gets a million views overnight, that's the sign of a
viral video. But not every business needs or wants such huge
viewership. For certain types of videos and businesses, a total
of 100 views might be good -- as long as they're from your
targeted audience. You have to judge performance based on your
own parameters, and with realistic expectations.

2. Track traffic sources.
You can more effectively promote your videos if you know how
viewers found them. They can be linked to from other videos,
searched for on the YouTube site or connected through another
source.

For example, if you find that the majority of viewers discover a
video by searching on YouTube, you know you need to optimize
future videos for search. YouTube Analytics can help you by
showing the keywords that were searched for, so you can include
the most popular ones in the descriptions of subsequent videos.

You also can use the traffic sources metric to determine why a
particular video didn't perform well. Look at how viewers did --
or more important, didn't -- find the video. If, for example, a
video didn't pull well via search, then you know you need to pay
more attention to keywords in future video descriptions.

3. Track
engagement.
Merely viewing a video isn't enough. You want viewers to engage
with it, talk about it and share it with friends.

To help you monitor engagement, YouTube offers a number of
different reports. You can track how many people subscribe to
your YouTube channel, how many likes and dislikes a given video
received, how many people have given it a "favorite" tag, how
many comments were received about it and how many times it was
shared on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

The greater the level of engagement with your video, the better
you're connected with your customers and the more word-of-mouth
promotion they're likely to provide.

4. Track audience retention.
Just because someone starts a video, it doesn't mean he or she
will watch all the way through. Audience retention is an
important metric showing how long, on average, viewers watch each
video and when they lose interest and tune out.

YouTube's audience retention metric lets you see viewership on a
second-by-second basis. It's a useful tool for fine-tuning your
videos and producing ones that pack a punch from beginning to
end.

If you find that most of your viewers are watching only the
opening moments of your video, you know you're not grabbing them.
If a large percentage of viewers quit watching at a later point
in the video, you can try to determine what turned them off at
that juncture.

5. Track conversions.
YouTube Analytics can't help you here. You will have to examine
the number of conversions a video generates on your own linked-to
website.

The conversion metric, of course, depends on what type of
response you want. Is the video designed to generate sales, or is
it meant to drive traffic to your website? If you hope to boost
revenue, you would simply measure how many sales you made to
video viewers who linked to your site. You might find that a
video with a relatively small viewership actually delivers a
higher conversion rate -- and that's true success.